Highly recommended by the very generous PresentPerfect! Review here.

When a child is young enough to believe in truth and old enough to not have found it, fluid enough to need no foundation and rigid enough to want one, cynic enough to mislike the world and romantic enough to love it, then may they go wandering on dusty hooves through wood and plain and mountain, hungry for the warmth of other hearths and the caress of novel tongues and customs. And when their ears and eyes and heart and hooves are filled to overflowing, they must hope that the road has worn them to fit a door passed along the way.

A fairytale bildungsroman sort of thing, grown several times too large.

Death and violence are not frequent or terribly explicit, but they do appear.